Life Goes On (For Vera) (Ch.10b)

Vera had lost her job. It was everything she had worked toward for the last twenty years. She regaled herself for having lost it. It was her own fault for getting too carried away with Luvius. She should have known it would lead to this. She should have been more careful. If only she had worked harder and not tried to spend so much time with him she would not have attracted the attention of the managers. She could have kept her head down and survived. If only she had done that she would still be seeing Luvius now. Instead the managers had determined that they should be separated “for their own good” to enable them to fulfil the requirements of their contracts effectively, so that they could progress in their careers without unnecessary distraction. What were the words they had used again? “To provide the framework for successful advancement and self fulfilment.”

The managers were always applying positive sounding words to all their statements. It was always difficult to determine what these phrases really meant. You had to think about it for quite a while before you were sure. And when you did work out the meanings you often wondered why something so obvious and straightforward had been couched in such complex terminology. There had been a time, not so long since, when Vera had been able to cut through such terminology, efficiently ascertaining its meaning to derive value from it and using that value in whatever study or work she was engaged in. She had even revelled in it on occasion. When interviewed for certain positions along her career path she had ambitiously taken pleasure in making up her own words to emphasise the positivity which she had wanted to convey. That was the secret of persuading your employers to grant you a new position. You had to make yourself sound as positive as possible, even if it was not true. Truth did not matter as much as positivity. Honesty in fact could be a very bad thing. Employers did not want to hear about an employee’s doubts or problems. They only needed employees for whom working for the organisation was the most important part of their lives. Any employee who did not see a “positive future” for her or himself within the career structure was an employee stuck in the hierarchy where he was. If he did his job to “normal” standards he would be safe but if he allowed those standards to slip below the average he could be demoted down the chain or perhaps even worse “promoted” to a job which was not at all pleasant. If an employee persisted in actual bad behaviour he could even be ejected from the organisation altogether. This result was everyone’s worst nightmare. Leaving the place of one’s career progress without a positive reason such as an ambitious career improvement could be disastrous. Any new potential employer would expect that something was very undesirable about an employee whose work must have been bad enough to be dismissed.

Few employers liked to dismiss if they could help it. It was not a task they enjoyed because it made them feel they had let a fellow citizen down. But business considerations had to come first when running a business and to most employers who were quite large business Houses the faces they dismissed were faceless. They had never met these employees. Dismissal was often carried out by Personnel or Staffing Managers who had never worked with the individuals and had often not made the decision to dismiss. Recommendations for dismissal usually went up the chain of command to a certain point where such a decision could be taken. Once taken it would be passed back to the Personnel Manager or Officer to be dealt with at arm’s length. In practice most organisations were always engaged in hiring and firing. The largest organisations were particularly keen hirers and firers because their size made them uncommitted to longstanding staff. The individuals whose fates were to be decided by the managers were faceless and replaceable.

Due to the phasing out at the beginning of the century of all unemployment support except for the critically ill or aged, laws had been strengthened which protected workers. This amounted to longer warning of dismissal periods than were previously the case. Initially warnings of unacceptable work performance were to be given, allowing weeks for improvement. If employees failed to improve to “normal” levels they could then be given notice to leave, a few weeks depending on the length of service in which they could begin to find a new job before they left their current employer. They would be more likely to find a new job if they had not been dismissed because they could claim to be moving for positive or development reasons. Once actually dismissed re-employment would be far more difficult. The unfortunates who failed to find work until after dismissal were more common in numbers than the others. The only ways of looking for work while still employed were either by using the Vidnet data banks in the free couple of hours before sleep or persuading your employer to give you extra time off during the normal working day, which was rare, although some who had decided that this employee was surplus to their requirements might be occasionally generous if they believed it did not harm their own interest.

Vera had not been dismissed however! Nothing so serious had occurred, but she had been demoted and earthed, which in MIOST could often be the same thing.

….Nightmare world of swirling competing commitment and distractions. Work and study, revision and updates, besides which private concerns pale into pockets of rushed pleasure. She tries to keep it all together, to prevent the breakdown that beckons her every day. But what is a breakdown, but a surrender, necessary for some in the circumstances they find themselves. The mind saying no to the artificial or unfair pressures heaped upon it. Relaxation is the answer and solution. Most people instinctively know this. They don’t need experts to tell them. But it is a remedy that cannot usually be applied. The system won’t allow it. To survive one must make the system work for you, by beating it at its own game or abusing it somewhat. Otherwise you might escape from it altogether like Vera’s mother, but she had a family, in particular a loving husband, and he let her do it and supported her. There were many others who found that way out of the rat race, but they needed to have a loyal supporter, or supporters in order to do it. One needs to be attractive enough in personality or looks for someone to want to look after you. A mother gets automatic loyalty from her offspring but finding a loyal husband or anyone to marry is not such an easy thing in this society of work and optimism, and Vidnet seclusion. Meeting anybody to marry is not so easy because there is nowhere for most people to meet.